RTL Design Engineer — Mixed-Signal Silicon

Cupertino, California, United States Hardware

At Apple, we work every day to craft products that enrich people's lives. If you're passionate about taking on unsolved challenges, we have a great opportunity for a results-oriented and highly motivated RTL Design Engineer. This is an exciting position in the world class Apple mixed-signal silicon design team!

This role will build upon your solid foundation in digital logic circuits while introducing mixed-signal and analog circuit design and features. You will work with a variety of flows fundamental to modern silicon engineering: modeling and integrating high-performance mixed-signal and analog IPs into high-speed digital circuits, ensuring formal equivalence between custom designs and their abstract representations. This is an excellent opportunity to gain valuable experience in software methods and analysis, which are increasingly crucial across the semiconductor industry.

As a member of our dynamic team, you will have the exceptional opportunity to help create the next generation of products that will delight and inspire millions of Apple customers every day. You will work to specify, design, verify, and support lab bring-up of sophisticated digital and mixed-signal circuits with signal processing capabilities.

Description

In this role, you will be responsible for specifying and/or micro-architecting digital and signal processing blocks in sophisticated mixed-signal circuits. You will be responsible for RTL coding of blocks specified by you or others, including implementation of DSP algorithms. You will also participate in the design verification and bring-up of such blocks by writing meaningful assertions, debugging code, and otherwise interacting with the design verification team.

You will contribute to the lab bring-up of those circuits by potentially writing test scripts, analyzing lab data, proposing experiments, and validating signal processing performance.

Responsibilities

• RTL Design & Implementation:
  Develop and optimize RTL code in Verilog/System Verilog for mixed-signal digital blocks and signal processing pipelines
• DSP Algorithm Translation:
  Collaborate with algorithm engineers to translate DSP concepts (filtering, transforms, modulation, signal analysis) into efficient, high-performance RTL implementations
• Design Verification:
  Write comprehensive assertions, unit-level test benches, and participate in functional verification using industry-standard methodologies
• Integration & Bring-up:
  Partner with cross-functional teams to integrate complex IPs, validate performance in silicon, and support lab characterization
• Collaborative Problem-Solving:
  Work effectively with analog designers, algorithm engineers, verification specialists, and system architects across disciplinary boundaries

Minimum Qualifications

• BS and a minimum of 10 years relevant industry experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Front-end tools expertise (Verilog simulators, linters, clock-domain crossing checkers)
• Synthesis, static timing analysis, and design-for-test (DFT)
• System Verilog assertions, checkers, and advanced verification techniques
• Scripting languages (Perl, Python)
• Formal verification and low-power design methodologies
• Hardware-software co-design and system-level optimization
• Hands-on DSP experience: signal processing concepts, RTL algorithm implementation, hardware optimization techniques (pipelining, parallelization, resource sharing)
• Intermediate to advanced GenAI proficiency:
  Using AI tools for System Verilog design, validation, optimization, and understanding GenAI capabilities/limitations in hardware design

At Apple, base pay is one part of our total compensation package and is determined within a range. This provides the opportunity to progress as you grow and develop within a role. The base pay range for this role is between $181,100 and $318,400, and your base pay will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience, and location.

Apple employees also have the opportunity to become an Apple shareholder through participation in Apple’s discretionary employee stock programs. Apple employees are eligible for discretionary restricted stock unit awards, and can purchase…